After recently migrating a client to office 365 from on premise exchange, i discovered that there is no easy way of turning off exchange server on windows SBS.

After some research i discovered that the simplest way was to turn off all of the exchange related services on the server.

  1. Open services by running services.msc
  2. Scroll to M and turn off all services starting with Microsoft Exchange (Turning off the first service should turn off most other services)
  3. Right click on each service and select properties
  4. Set the drop down to disabled
  5. Now when you start the server Exchange will no longer be running

It is amazing the speed improvement that many clients have gained, simply by turning off exchange server. One client was having constant drop outs of network drives and the server completely freezing for 10 Minutes. Now with exchange server off, the server is working perfectly. Now they can continue to use this server for a few more years, rather than spending huge amounts of money to replace it.

Obviously you are only going to be turning off exchange server if you have already migrated your Emails to another location. Office 365 for instance has been a perfect alternative for me , it makes administration easy and emails accessible for all users.